I watched the sun rise while I wrote this morning. “Write about the quality of light shining through your window.” That’s what my exercise was today. I’ve written ten pages per day the past two days in some wild effort to fill my composition book by the end of the month.
There was no light shining through the window at 6:21 when I picked up my pen. There was a blue darkness that I spent about 10 minutes trying to describe. I did not succeed. I wrote “why can I think of no blue things in nature that are the same as this color?” Robin’s eggs, blueberries. Bahama shallows, Atlantic depths. Forget-me-nots, Plumbago. The white porch rails and white siding of our house were none of these colors. They glowed blue-white like they do in moonlight.
I continued to write as the sky lightened and the first rays of sun struck the tops of the pear trees in the neighbor’s yard, a subtle glow on their round crowns. A few minutes later, pink cotton candy clouds appeared as the sun climbed above the horizon. The sky was a little closer to Robin’s egg blue at this point.
I wrote and wrote, a whole lot of nothing. It’s amazing how much nothing you can write in 30 minutes. I’m not sure the point of it all, but it does feel quite good. I feel like I’m unclogging arteries. Cleaning things out. There’s nothing I’m preparing for, no book I plan to write, no great masterpiece. I’m just writing because I like to write.
Butterfly Mind 
“First thought, best thought.”
This was a Zen Buddhist teaching that Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac tried to put into their writing in the mid-50s.
It reflects the Buddhist principle of first emptying the mind of random, useless information through sitting and meditation.
Then letting thoughts/observations/ sensations flow back in. These are written down as they are experienced unimpeded by self-censorship and other distractions.
First thought, best thought.
Snyder has stayed with Zen throughout his life.
Kerouac did not have the temperament or patience to stay with the practice. Although he modified the idea through his own attempts at “spontaneous writing.” These came out mostly as little poems.
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I should add for literary clarity that Allen Ginsberg, fellow Beat poet and great pal of Kerouac, popularized “first thought, best thought.”
He extended it for years through his own spontaneous poetry.
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I loved reading your whole lot of nothing! I could see it happening before your eyes–almost!
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When nothing is becoming words written it is becoming something. Perhaps we might not see but often others do, at least that keeps me writing about this n that
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